realm requested that their courts be more empowered, while the nobility (like their
seventeenth-century counterparts) complained of corruption and inefficiency in
their courts.
In the spirit of the“well-ordered police state,”magistracies were expected to
found social welfare institutions such as schools, hospitals, and homes for illegit-
imate children until they became of age to join the army or navy, just as governors
were supposed to do in the countryside. Consciousness of such needs in the 1720s
reflects a broader European problem of the urban poor (illegitimate children,
unwed mothers, the elderly, disabled, and other needy): many, primarily Catholic,
countries responded by relying on religious and state funding to create foundling
homes, orphanages, and services, while Protestant countries passed“poor laws”that
assessed a tax on local communities to care for their own poor. In Russia, neither
towns nor governors found the resources to fulfill these mandates for social
responsibility.
Socially, the magistracy reform renamed but did not fundamentally transform
the urban taxpaying stratum. In Muscovite times, taxpaying townsmen (posadskie
liudi) were ranked into three numbered groups based on wealth, topped in a few
large trade centers by three merchant corporations (gostiand two“hundreds”). The
magistracy reform reorganized these categories into three“guilds” of“regular
citizens”according to wealth and occupation ranging from merchants to artisans.
They were trade corporations, not craft guilds on the medieval European model,
which tradition Russia lacked. Below these categories were“irregular”citizens, or
laborers. The“first guild”of wealthiest merchants was like the oldgosti; they carried
out large-scale foreign and domestic trade and were settled primarily in Moscow,
St. Petersburg, and the industrial center of Tula. The Magistracy initiative freed
guilds of the onerous burden of conscription (they were allowed to buy their way
out), but all remained burdened with poll tax, taxes on shops and sales, billeting,
and onerous service obligations.
At the same time towns remained conglomerations of people of different social
class with different rights and privileges, such as nobility, soldiers, and military
men. In the eighteenth century urban taxpayers amounted to 40 percent of the
average city’s population, nobles and clergy each consistently amounted to fewer
than 5 percent of the urban population, military and people of various social estates
(raznochintsy) were each less than 15 percent, and the percentage of peasants living
in towns grew to almost equal taxpaying townsmen. As we have seen, these
disparate forces undermined townsmen’s supposed exclusivity in trade and manu-
facturing over this century. In 1755 the nobility was granted exclusive rights to
production and wholesale sale of alcohol, although merchants ran retail taverns; in
1762 merchants lost to the nobility their 1721 right to purchase populated villages
for industry and had to resort to hired labor (which would often be serfs and state
peasants from quitrent-paying villages). Some of Catherine II’s Physiocratic moves
undermined merchants’privileges as well: a March 1775 decree allowed anyone to
set up a manufacturing enterprise without formal state permits; in 1782 retail trade
was declared open to all but serfs, and in the late 1790s even they received that right
in the capitals for a fee, affirming existing practice.
Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform 379